Category: News

Grazed from HDS. Author: Editorial Staff.

The world includes hundreds of millions of interconnected devices or things. These things range from handheld mobile platforms to systems that will observe the universe. At a coarse level this is what the Internet of Things (IoT) is all about: devices that are connected either directly or through a proxy to either an Intranet or the Internet.

However is there a more robust or even a formally authored standard definition? Unfortunately the state of the standards work is more immature than Cloud Computing. As recently as 2013 the European Union’s Internet of Things Architecture team states, “…after many years of heavy discussion, there is still no clear and common definition of the concept [21].” For the purposes of this paper the definition from the International Telecommunications Union is referenced…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Scientists from AT&T, IBM and Applied Communication Sciences (ACS) announced a proof-of-concept technology that reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity from days to seconds. This advance is a major step forward that could one day lead to sub-second provisioning time with IP and next-generation optical networking equipment and enables elastic bandwidth between clouds at high connection request rates using intelligent cloud data center orchestrators, instead of requiring static provisioning for peak demand.

The prototype was built with contributions and expertise from AT&T, IBM and ACS, and the work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Government’s DARPA CORONET program, which focuses on rapid reconfiguration of terabit networks. "The program was visionary in anticipating the convergence of cloud computing and networking, and in setting aggressive requirements for network performance in support of cloud services" said Ann Von Lehmen, the ACS program lead…

Grazed from SkyHigh Networks.  Author: PR Announcement.

SkyHigh Networks has moved to collaborate with SafeNet in an attempt to deliver flexible and secure key management solutions for the enterprise data in the cloud.  The partnership will help businesses retain full control of their encryption keys whilst leveraging on-premise or cloud-based models, in turn meeting the compliance needs of their corporate and regulatory requirements.

Chris Cesio, VP of business development and alliances, Skyhigh Networks, said: "More and more organisations are asking to encrypt their data in business-critical SaaS applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365 with customer-managed keys…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Dan Goodin.

Attackers have figured out a new way to get Amazon’s cloud service to wage potent denial-of-service attacks on third-party websites—by exploiting security vulnerabilities in an open source search and analytics application known as Elasticsearch. The power of Backdoor.Linux.Ganiw.a was documented earlier this month by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab.

Among other things, the trojan employs DNS amplification, a technique that vastly increases the volume of junk traffic being directed at a victim by abusing poorly secured domain name system servers. By sending DNS queries that are malformed to appear as if they came from the victim domain, DNS amplification can boost attack volume by 10-fold or more. The technique can be especially hard to block when distributed among thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised computers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Open source cloud computing is on the rise, and one vendor is hoping to take things to the next level. Odoo, formerly OpenERP, recently went through a change of name, and the company has also raised $10 million in funding to push its open source cloud marketing, but it also plans to soon release version 8 of its suite of cloud-based business services.

A media alert noted that the company has made "gentle waves" in the open source software world, but it is hoping to make a bigger splash this year. Odoo provides customers with a suite of open source business applications that are aimed at organizations with a lower level of technology experience and knowledge. Its goal is to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) with any of their online needs, from building their own websites to running ecommerce, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, manufacturing and more…

Grazed from CSO. Author: David Braue.

IT and security leaders should arm themselves with details about the location of their corporate data and use a growing comfort with cloud computing to address policy concerns about data sovereignty, a recent Gartner analysis has recommended. The research firm’s The Snowden Effect: Data Location Matters report warned that knee-jerk reactions to questions about the physical location of corporate data were becoming increasingly difficult as a growing tide of organisations began to embrace offshore cloud services.

While tools such as encryption were in use to protect offshore data by 38 percent of 221 executives surveyed by Gartner, many organisations never got that far. With IT leaders often “entangled” in discussions on the issue with stakeholders and advisors from legal, customer, regulatory, management and other organisations, an overall fear of committing data to overseas cloud services had been reinforced by ambiguous guidance on the issue…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

A group of Dell experts, customers and partners, as well as analysts and journalists, debate the issues of security in a rapidly evolving IT world. Mobile computing, the cloud, bring-your-own-device and the Internet of things are trends that are changing the way computing is being done, and forcing businesses big and small to rethink what security needs to look like in order to protect the growing numbers of user devices and data.

At a recent panel discussion in Boston, Dell officials and customers, as well as analysts and journalists, discussed the security challenges that these trends bring with them, the issues facing enterprises and small and midsize businesses, and what will security measures will be needed in a world where workers are more mobile and armed with more smartphones and tablets, data is stored in the cloud and information is constantly flowing across networks to and from a multitude of systems, machines and devices…

Grazed from OutOfTheBox.  Author: Eapen Chacko.

Back in 2013, when the the hype about cloud computing and big data was gathering steam, we wrote,  "Unfortunately, none of this really makes it any clearer who is going to carry the day as far as supporting the migration of mega-cap, public multinational corporations to a public cloud computing infrastructure. Will one or more of these companies really want their entire IT infrastructure to reside with a bookseller and operator of global merchandise bazaars?"

Last week, the theory that Amazon Web Services would be the growth and earnings engine for the company was called into question. Data security, risk management, documentation and mitigation of breaches will weigh more heavily on CIOs, particularly in health care and financial services, than saving a few nominal bucks by outsourcing data storage and applications…

Grazed from EUKHost.  Author: Asher Ross.

One hundred thirty-one billion dollars. This is the turnover of the worldwide market for public cloud services that have been provided in 2013. According to a report by Gartner, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) represent the fastest growing segment, growing by 47.3% year on year, the concept of cloud computing

This is the segment of the advertising based on cloud computing, which would have constituted the largest portion of the market for public IT cloud services in 2013 (48%). Service Cloud Processes (Platform as a Service or PaaS) is the second largest of the total market (28%) segment, followed by the (Software as a Service or SaaS ) (14, 7%), the Service Infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service or  IaaS) (5.5%), cloud services management and security (2.8%) and the Service Platform ( IT Process as a Service or IPaaS) (1%)…

Grazed from News-Press.  Author: PR Announcement.

The R-rated comedy “Sex Tape” didn’t quite connect with audiences the way the execs at Sony Pictures hoped it would, but one aspect of the movie did seem to resonate in these technologically confusing times: seemingly no one knows anything about “the cloud.”

In the movie, which made its way to theaters on July 18, a husband (Jason Segel) and wife (Cameron Diaz) use their new iPad to record themselves doing, well, what the title implies. Afterwards, however, Mr. Segel’s character not only forgets to delete the racy video, but accidentally uploads it to “the cloud” where it can be seen by their family, their friends and even the neighborhood mailman…